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A woman reads the <em>New Express</em> newspaper, which, on October 23, 2013, carried a full-page editorial under the headline ‘Please Release Him.’ The editorial, a rare example of defiance by the Chinese media, called on authorities to free Chen Yongzhou, an investigative reporter who was arrested for defamation after he reported on ‘financial problems’ at a partly state-owned company.

Title

Regulating the Fourth Estate in China

A Sinica Podcast

by Kaiser Kuo

December 26, 2014

The Sinica Podcast is a weekly discussion of current affairs in China hosted by long-time Beijing residents Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn. Launched in April 2010, the podcast is recorded in various locations in China, the USA, and around the world.

The explosion of the commercial media sphere in China over the last decade hasn't been particularly subtle, especially if you're anything like us and walk past multiple Chinese newsstands in the morning. But let's look beyond the way kiosks have traded promoting the Beijing Evening News for hawking glossy cosmetics adverts and celebrity gossip rags, and ask how the rise of a for-profit press has affected the way the Chinese government regulates the industry, and what the consequences of this are for the rise of what we traditionally think of as the role of the fourth estate in Western democracies.

As we turn our focus to these questions, Kaiser Kuo is delighted to be joined by Daniela Stockmann, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Leiden and the woman who quite literally wrote the book on this subject with the publication of Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, a fact-heavy tome that goes into detail about how China has managed to maintain its apparatus of media control despite its ostensible shift towards a commercially-oriented media sector.